Joanna Lyle is the designer and face behind the eponymous luxury lifestyle fashion brand that is widely recognised for its beautiful fabrics. Born into a family of artists from northern England, Joanna inherited a passion for colour, a love of quality craftsmanship and an innate need to create.
“I arrived in Milan, my design “Mecca”, in my early twenties with 60 kilos of luggage and a sewing machine, about £ 100 and two words of Italian, ciao and buongiorno.”
In 1990, Joanna won the “Alessi Memory Containers” competition with her “Chimu” bowl – the beginning of a long collaboration with Alessi, resulting in the now iconic, egg-shaped “Ovo” kitchen range. Other manufacturers took note, and she went on to develop products with leading companies, such as Acerbis International, Fiam and Arredaesse. In 2003, Joanna launched her first collection of self-produced interior products in collaboration with Swarovski under the name of Joanna Lyle Design. Subsequently, Joanna began using watercolours to express her innate sense of colour, experimenting with printing on velvet, silk and wool to develop highly-original fabrics for interiors and a little later a range of wool and velvet scarves. Their instantaneous success encouraged her to use her designs for prints and embroidery in a range of distinctive clothing and fashion accessories. Today Joanna’s instantly-recognisable designs are worn by Italian fashion bloggers, actresses, musicians — and her loyal Milanese customers.